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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Democrats Could Lose Again in 2018

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Ted Rall
You’re reading this, so you probably follow political punditry. And if you follow political punditry, you’ve been hearing the usual corporate suspects predict that one of two things will happen in this fall’s midterm elections: either the Democrats will win big (win back the Senate), or they’ll win really big (the House too). Outta the way, Congressional Republicans: here comes the Big Blue Wave! Of course, these are the same clowns who called it big for President Hillary. Yet on and on they yammer, and we have to listen to them since big-money political media won’t hire anyone who has a clue. Interestingly, there are early warning signs — just as there were throughout the 2016 presidential race — that Democrats may be counting their electoral chickens before they’re aborted. “The Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot, which asks people whether they’ll vote for Democrats or Republicans for Congress, has dwindled since the heart of the tax debate in…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Democrats Have Hijacked the Anti-Trump Resistance

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Ted Rall
Conservative “tough on crime” Democrat Kamala Harris trolls for 2020 votes. Leftists want to change the world. They want peace, equal income, equal wealth, equal rights for everybody. Democrats are not part of the Left. If Democrats have their way, the fundamental inequality of American capitalism, a system in which 1% of the people “earn” 82% of the income, will never change. Democrats apply identity politics as a distraction, in lieu of systematic solutions to class-based discrimination. Democrats demand more women directors in Hollywood, more African-Americans admitted to Ivy League schools, transgendered soldiers in the military so they can join the slaughter of brown people in other countries. Donald Trump represented a rare opportunity for the Left. After eight years of fascism with a smile, the American system got a figurehead as visually and tonally repugnant as its foreign policy (drones, aggressive wars, coups, undermining popular elected leaders) and its domestic reality (widespread poverty, crumbling infrastructure, no social safety net,…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Grey Wall of Silence: Trump Is Right About Newspaper Libel Laws

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Ted Rall
“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts,” Donald Trump said recently. “And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.” Yes, Trump is a jerk. True, he himself is the Slanderer-in-Chief. Granted, he’s a bit of a fascist. Pertinently, libel laws are state laws. Neither the president nor Congress can change them. But even an authoritarian hypocrite is right sometimes. And Trump is dead right that the nation’s libel laws are “a sham and a disgrace.” My defamation lawsuit against The Los Angeles Times is a case study. (I’ve written about the merits of my case elsewhere. Here, I ask you to simply consider the process of lodging a complaint and taking it to a jury to…
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Meet Ted Rall and Harmon Leon Live in Philadelphia: 3 Dates This Weekend!

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Ted Rall
Genius stand-up comic Harmon Leon and I will be presenting our new book “Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America” at three dates — Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights — this coming weekend in Philadelphia. Come and hang out, and buy the new book! Paperback is $22, Hardback is $28. Friday, January 19, 2018, Time 7-9 pm: Ted Rall Live in Philadelphia Wooden Shoe Books 704 South St Philadelphia, PA 19147 Ted and comedian Harmon Leon discuss their new book “Meet the Deplorables: Inside Trump America.” Saturday, January 20, 2018, 7:30 pm: Ted Live in Philadelphia PhilaMOCA (Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art) 531 N 12th St Philadelphia, PA 19123 Ted and comedian Harmon Leon discuss their new book “Meet the Deplorables: Inside Trump America.” Sunday, January 21, 2018, 7 pm: Ted Live in Philadelphia Tattooed Mom 530 South St. Philadelphia, PA 19147 Ted and comedian Harmon Leon discuss their new book “Meet the Deplorables: Inside Trump America.” If you want Harmon…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: So What if President Trump is an Asshole? All the Presidents Have Been Assholes.

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Ted Rall
President Trump is under fire and we’re all shocked shocked SHOCKED that his shithole mouth called the (predominantly black) nations of Africa “shitholes,” helpfully comparing them to (predominantly blonde) Norway to make sure nobody missed the point. To drive home just how pissed off people are about this (and rightly so), Trump’s shithole comment overshadowed news that the government accidentally told the citizens of Hawaii they were about to get nuked. As George W. Bush would say, that’s some weird shit. This is a big deal unless you’re reading this more than a few days after this writing, at which point Trump will have raised more hell with some new idiotic utterance that makes us forget about this one. Speaking of hell-raising: I managed to raise a few social-media hackles recently when I posted the following: “I honestly don’t understand why people are so depressed about Trump. Policy-wise, he isn’t much different than Obama. Trump is truth in advertising: he…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: No Way Would Today’s Newspapers Publish the Pentagon Papers

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Ted Rall
Steven Spielberg’s new movie “The Post” depicts a newspaper’s decision to defy the government, risk its financial health and imprisonment of its editors in order to report a hard truth and defend the press’ First Amendment rights by publishing the Pentagon Papers. After the Washington Post’s decision to inform the American people that top government officials had known that the Vietnam War was unwinnable yet had repeatedly lied about it for years, editor Ben Bradlee (played by Tom Hanks) dumps a pile of out-of-town newspapers on a desk for publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) to see. We’ve started a “rebellion,” Bradlee informs Graham. We’re no longer alone speaking truth to power. No way would that happen today. I was pleased to see that “The Post” highlights the pressures and biases that weighed against publication: a publisher undermined by sexism and low expectations, a paper trying to raise capital under the eye of nervous bankers, the Nixon Administration’s take-no-prisoners prosecutorial abuse…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Michael Wolff’s Book Shows Hillary Clinton was an Even Crappier Candidate Than We Thought

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Ted Rall
I’ve been saying, for over a year, that Donald Trump is a dog who caught a car: he wanted to run for president, not be president. Looks like my theory is confirmed. “Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy,” writes Michael Wolff in an excerpt from his book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump.” Clearly, Trump has pivoted. The celebrity real estate magnate has stopped worrying. Long forgotten are his reluctant move to D.C., his fantasies of governing from his brass-trimmed Manhattan aerie. He…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: If Hillary Clinton Had Won, We’d Be Even Worse

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Ted Rall
What if Hillary Clinton had won 114,000 more votes in four key states? Or, what if she’d picked up the two to three percent of the vote she lost because Bernie Sanders’ supporters sat on their hands on election day? She’d be “Clinton 2” or “Clinton 45” or “the second President Clinton” — and the world would look very different. In terms of personnel and therefore policy, a Clinton Administration II would look and feel like a mash-up of Obama’s third term and a throwback to figures who populated her husband’s White House during the 1990s. Having moved to the right since Bill’s first term, progressive figures like then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich would be out in the cold. Rahm Emanuel and Timothy Geithner could expect cabinet offers. So could some Bush-era neo-cons like Robert Kagan. Hillary didn’t promise much change to domestic policy during her campaign. Her biggest proposal was to spend $275 billion on infrastructure, which would have left…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: If I Were Trump, I’d Totally Fire Robert Mueller

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Ted Rall
If I were Trump, I’d fire Robert Mueller. If I were advising Trump, I’d tell him he should fire Mueller. I know: this directly contradicts conventional wisdom. Which is fine. If I’ve learned anything from this life, it’s that if you don’t have a clue about anything, do exactly the opposite of what the crowd does and you’ll come out ahead in the end. If you follow the pseudo-liberal opinion writers at corporate media outlets who dictate conventional wisdom in American electoral political commentary, you know that the one thing that they are confident the president wouldn’t dare do is fire the former FBI director/special counsel. Trump may be enough of a wild card to describe neo-Nazis as very fine people. Trump might use his Twitter account to provoke a nuclear war with North Korea. But fire Mueller? That would be crossing a very russet line. At this writing, Trump says he has no plan to can the investigator. But…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Lost Opportunities for Women: Sexism Sucks, But Blame Capitalism More

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Ted Rall
One of the points many women have made since the beginning of the current national discussion about sexual assault and harassment has been that sexism and misogyny have cost women countless opportunities to achieve their full potential.       Probably because this began with Harvey Weinstein, much of the mourning of opportunity costs focused on Hollywood: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd mentioned her reaction to research she did on the topic: “I got more and more angry as I realized that these women were being systematically excluded based on ridiculous biases.” It’s an excellent, long-overdue point: Who could possibly count how many brilliant women have been denied high-profile roles as actors and directors and studio executives as the result of the studios’ toxic “casting couch” culture? How much great insight and entertainment have the rest of us, including men, lost because we have been denied the full expression of women censored because they refused to sleep with some nasty executive?…
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